3 Ways to Get the Most from Your Product Hunt Launch Using Workbot For Slack

March 23, 2016

For most companies, getting hunted on Product Hunt is a big deal – it can provide a start up with its initial user group or help build buzz around the launch. In fact, it’s only been about a month since the Workato team released our own product, Workbot for Slack on Product Hunt, and we certainly did our best to optimize our launch and engage with the community.

So what’s Workbot for Slack? Workbot is a bot for Slack (or Hipchat) that you can command to perform business processes using your cloud apps like Salesforce, MailChimp, Zendesk, Eventbrite, Jira and more directly from your chatbox. You can get smart notifications from Zendesk, access customer information from Salesforce, create new tickets in your apps and more without ever logging into the app or leaving Slack’s chatbox.

When Product Hunt announced that they would be having a Hackathon, our team decided to spread the love and optimize Workbot’s abilities for Product Hunters specifically. We targeted two types of Product Hunters – the users who browse Product Hunt to find awesome new products, and the makers who create products to post on Product Hunt. Here are Workbot’s capabilities that will help you create the perfect launch.

For Makers Launching on Product Hunt, Workbot Can:

1. Notify you when product votes hit a milestone you set and post status updates on Social Media

It’s important to stay on top of and share the progress of your product to build momentum. Workbot can ping you in Slack each time your hunt has hit 100 votes or whatever threshold you set (every 200 or every 50 votes for instance). It will then ask you if you want to post this milestone on your social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. If you say yes, Workbot can automatically post for you straight from Slack.

You can start notifications for your hunt by typing in this command in the channel of your choice: @workbot producthunt start notifications name:product upvoted. You can choose to post it either on Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter or even all 3 by typing in @workbot yes 1, @workbot yes 2 according to the commands displayed.

2. Notify you when an influential person upvotes your product.

When you’ve put a new product on Product Hunt, influential voters can be the difference between falling under the radar and a wildly successful launch. Making sure you know who your influencers are, answering their questions, and sharing their praise is essential to making the most of your launch.

Usually product makers have to wait until the launch is over and several days pass to process the data and identify influencers. Now, when an influential person upvotes your product you’ll know immediately thanks to Workbot and can send a thank you note to them on Twitter. Workbot can even automatically load the list of influencers into a CRM, lead management system or even Google Sheets for incredibly easy follow-ups. An influencer is defined as Product Hunt followers + twitter followers = greater than 5000. You can change the threshold from 5000 to greater than 2000 or whatever you think constitutes a person as influential.

You can start notifications for your hunt by typing in the command in the channel of your choice: @workbot producthunt start notifications name:new vote. You can thank them on Twitter by saying @workbot yes when prompted.

2a. Collect every voter’s information and put it into your CRM

Workbot can also pull every voter’s information including their Facebook id, Twitter handle, LinkedIn profile etc. and store it in your CRM such as Salesforce or Infusionsoft. This is a pretty amazing tool for products looking to collect their initial pool of users and for any company that wants to follow up with voters.

3. Track the vote performance of your hunt/posts

Workbot allows you to track the performance of your hunt by plotting a graph of the number of votes it got at each hour. Instead of waiting until the hunt is over to gather data, you can enjoy an instant visualization of your progress, giving you a more in depth view in real time.